Read This, Watch That: Quarantine Bonus Edition

Patricia: What’s your greatest ambition in life?Parvulesco: To become immortal, then die.

—Breathless (1960)

“…that’s what happens when you immerse yourself too fully in any vastness, you eventually become part of it, part of the landscape, quite literally.”

—Chloe Aridjis, Sea Monsters

Aridjis’ novel and Godard’s iconic mark on the French New Wave moment share a listless spirit. There’s a poetic meandering and an artful navel-gazing at work in both.

With this pairing, you’ll find:

Faces communicating where languages fail

Superficiality on the cusp of depth

Smart, young women deliberately selecting fruitless detours

Lethargic exploration

The intersection of mundanity and impetuous, youthful romanticism

Aesthetics superseding plot

Building intricate sandcastles in spite of (because of?) their fleeting nature

Waiting for a relationship to be important enough to overtake your life

Refusing clear warnings, whether color-coded flags or uniformed cops

How a sense of adventure can be more thrilling than its result

You’re left with the sense that these characters prefer to make decisions like the book’s Luisa chooses trees. “In general I preferred plants with branches, they were more expressive, but I couldn’t help feeling affection for these armless trees. Simply a long trunk ending in fireworks of leaves.”

📚🎥 Read This, Watch That Bonus Round 📚🎥

Here, in this virtual space, nobody’s telling you how to feel. Some people are busier than ever. Some have developed strange hobbies. Some of you are experiencing serious grief and trauma. And some haven’t noticed much of a lifestyle change at all.

Regardless, we all need to escape into some good art so we can forge ahead with some kind of sanity.

With that in mind, below are additional book and movie pairings that’ll help you leave a permanent indent on your couch.

Claire Hopple is the author of three books: Tell Me How You Really Feel (forthcoming), Tired People Seeing America (Dostoevsky Wannabe, 2019), and Too Much of the Wrong Thing (Truth Serum Press, 2017). Her fiction has been published in Hobart, Timber, Heavy Feather Review and others. More at clairehopple.com.